(And
together we'll keep on walking, because we still cannot return to
morning
Even
now, the inerasable sin deep in my chest hurts, but…
I
remember the painfulness of the love I lost back then
I'm
a little perplexed by the vivid blueness of this sky) -Kesenai
Tsumi (Inerasable Sin), Full Metal Alchemist OP

No one looked at
Naruto and saw Naruto. You couldn't look at him without seeing
something else.

The villagers saw the
Demon. They saw nights of fire, and loved ones dead and bleeding on
the streets; raw red energy blazing in the darkness, fading the sun,
nightmare and myth emerged into reality. They looked at the boy and
saw the Fox.

His classmates, his
peers, they looked at him and saw an idiot. Here was the boy who
could never get an answer right, or go through an exercise with any
modicum of skill. Here was the boy the teachers sneered at, the boy
their parents warned them never to be like. Here was the boy who
didn't have a thought in his mind except those that had to do with
making trouble for everyone else. But at least – and it was a 'east'
– at least they saw a boy.

Kakashi looked at him
and saw the past.

That sunbright hair –
those features, gone rounded and smooth with baby-fat but refining
into familiar angles more and more everyday – the wide white grin,
even with slightly oversized canines – and those eyes. He'd
seen them a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, before, in his
childhood. But then they had been the items of worship for a
young, adoring genin, they'd belonged to his chief and captain and
god. They didn't belong – hadn't belonged– to a clumsy
little boy.

He couldn't stand to
see the boy who fidgeted and fell and failed. He couldn't stand to
remember his dead god in this too-lively bundle of orange rage. And
he couldn't stand teaching him; he always felt so awkward, like a
piece gone wrong in a puzzle, teaching things that the Yellow Flash
had taught him to the boy who could have been him come
again.

'How
do you dare presume to teach your master? How do you dare?'

He
didn't dare. So he turned away, and focused instead on the boy who
he could teach rightly, the boy who fit into the puzzle neatly and
sharply.

And if those blue eyes
looked at him in hurt and anger, he only had to shut one eye,
and then he didn't see them anymore.

And when those blue
eyes turned away from him, fixing instead – and here was a nice bit
of symmetry – on Jiraiya, on the Legend, well, that was right too.
Jiraiya had once upon a time taught another pair of blue eyes, and he
would know how to teach this pair too, on how to see patterns in your
enemy's attack, how to fight and kill and run, how to summon the
wind to your hand and spirits to your aid.

The red-eyed boy went
away to the Snake. The blue-eyed boy went away with Jiraiya, and came
back looking more and more like the hero of Kakashi's youth. Now he
could look at Naruto and not wince away; he could look at him and
remember, and Naruto fit the puzzle of Kakashi's memory with the
quiet click of something that is preeminently suited for its place.
And his place, as the other's place had been, was Hokage.

He could look at
Naruto. But Naruto no longer looked at him.

and together we'll
keep on walking, because we still cannot return to morning

funny what you can get
by rambling (in text). Naruto&Co. doesn't belong to me. Cos if
he did, I'd whack Kakashi for what he done to Naru-chan, then I
would huggle him to death for everything else.

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